World-leading financial institution rolls out backup as a service globally, scaling to accommodate 1,000+ PBs

Challenge

In the late 2010s, a premier multinational financial institution operating in more than 30 countries launched a massive IT transformation program. The goal: modernize service delivery by building a menu of cloud services, billing each department based on consumption (chargeback model). To efficiently deliver a backup service, the IT organization needed to consolidate from seven backup solutions running on multiple hardware platforms to a single solution with the scale and flexibility to support multiple workloads and levels of protection.

Why Cohesity

After an exhaustive proof of concept (PoC) with several leading vendors, the financial institution chose Cohesity. The PoC demonstrated that Cohesity Data Cloud scales easily, enables fast recovery, and integrates seamlessly with other systems for automation and analytics. IT leaders especially appreciated that the Cohesity team welcomed new feature requests and quickly delivered the requested capabilities.

Today, the financial institution protects more than 1,000 PB of data with Cohesity, maintaining three backup copies of production data in data centers around the world.

Business Value

Scalability

Cohesity Data Cloud scaled to accommodate 500% growth in backup volume between 2022 and 2024. The original four-node cluster has expanded to more than 500 clusters and 22,000 nodes.

Faster provisioning

Backup capacity requests are fulfilled months sooner than before because requests are no longer delayed while the IT team evaluates more than a dozen software and hardware combinations. Departments simply request the appropriate Cohesity Data Cloud module from a service catalog.

Resilience

Restoring a lost or corrupted file or VM now takes a fraction of the time required with previous solutions. When a data entry error wiped out a 200 TB database powering a customer-facing application, the IT team restored it in less than 24 hours.

Simpler management with automation

IT support staff rarely log into individual Cohesity Data Cloud clusters. Instead, they use Cohesity APIs to pull performance and activity data into an analytics platform, making it easy to determine who did what, when, and how.

Partnership to adapt to emerging business requirements

In direct response to the financial institution's requests, Cohesity has introduced more than 75 new features and 250 enhancements over time. These improvements are available to all Cohesity customers. The financial institution also plans to expand its Cohesity Data Cloud deployment to include protection for midrange systems, mainframes, and cloud workloads such as Microsoft 365.